Chapter 5 Thin Walls #2
I gave the corridor something to know. I gripped her thick hips and drove into her harder, fucking her in earnest now, my hips clapping against her ass, the table creaking, the wet slap of skin on skin loud in the small room, her ass rippling with every impact, and she met every stroke and threw her head back and let the wing hear her.
Footsteps came down the hall outside, and slowed, and paused, the owner of them realizing all at once what they were walking past. Bianca’s eyes flew open and she looked back at me and her grin went wicked and she got louder, deliberately, gloriously, performing for the pause.
Let them hear, querido. Let them hear what the new boy can do.
That’s the point. That was always the point.
I pulled out of her then, my cock slick and glistening, just long enough to haul her upright off the table, her back against my chest, and turned the both of us square to the thin door, the corridor and whoever was still paused behind it, and bent her forward again over the table edge with her chin lifted toward it, and fit myself to her again and pushed back in deep, and now she was aimed straight at her audience, performing right down the line of it.
“Oh,” she breathed, her eyes fixed on the door, her grin enormous. “Let them stand out there and picture it, amor. Let them picture exactly this.”
So I gave her exactly that. I fucked her like that, slow then not, one hand sliding up to cup and squeeze a heavy swinging breast, rolling the dark nipple between my fingers, watching her play to a corridor that couldn’t see a thing and get off harder on the idea of being heard than on anything my hands were doing, her free hand finding mine on her hip and pressing it down harder, demanding it deeper.
And when she came it was loud and unhidden and thrown at the door like a gift, the clutch of her squeezing and fluttering around me in long greedy spasms, the loud joyful length of her locking and shaking against me, and the grip of her dragged me over the edge a moment after, buried as deep as I could get, and I came inside her deep, spilling jet after jet, filling her while she ground back onto me to keep me there, milking it, her heel hooked around the back of my leg, both of us breathing hard in the steam with the candles guttering low.
“Distinction,” she panted, eventually, grinning over her shoulder at the door in case it was still out there listening. “That’s a pass with distinction. I’ll fill in your training record.”
She did, in fact, fill in a training record, later, a real form, with a straight face, in which I passed Advanced Therapeutic Technique with the highest available mark and a remark in the comments box that said exceptional hands, takes direction, will require ongoing assessment.
She kept it, pinned inside her own locker where only she could see it.
The footsteps in the corridor had been Yuki’s.
I found this out the next morning, when Yuki, charting at the staff table, said, to her clipboard, without inflection, “Room three needs new linens.”
“It’s clean,” Bianca said, too quickly.
“It needs new linens,” Yuki repeated, making a note. “Again.” She did not look up. Color had crept back up the side of her neck. “I’ll log it under wear and tear.”
Poppy, who had just taken a mouthful of tea, choked on it, and had to be patted on the back by Bianca, who was laughing too hard to do it properly, and across the table Yuki kept charting, perfectly composed, not a flicker on her face, the only still point in a room she had just set on fire with eleven words.
Friday, the cohort arrived on the morning cable car.
The cable car ran all morning, ferrying guests and their luggage, and the front hall filled with the quiet hum of arrival, robes appearing, the discretion bubble thickening. I watched some of it from the gallery while I rehung the door I’d planed.
The first one out was different from the rest, and I knew it before I knew her name.
She didn’t drift like the cashmere woman on my first day. She arrived.
Tall, taller in the heels, and she had walked in meaning to be looked at, so I looked: the designer heels striking the stone, the long legs, the deep architectural curve of the suit at the hip and the waist, broad shoulders set like a woman who has never once let a room set them for her, and a close-cropped natural hair with an edge-up so sharp it could have cut the cold off the cable car.
Dark skin, flawless, luminous against the pale stone of the hall.
Earrings doing the work other women’s hair would do.
The suit announced who would be in charge of any room she entered, armor cut by someone who’d been paid a great deal to make it look like fashion.
She moved like the building had been waiting for her, which, given what she was paying, it had been.
She did not look around like arriving guests do, taking in the famous hush, the engineered water, the discretion.
She assessed it. Priced it. Logged it. The hall was a vendor and she was deciding whether it had met spec.
She went straight to the desk, set down a leather folder, and slid it across to Poppy without a word of greeting.
Poppy opened it, read the first page, and her reading slowed, her thumb stopping dead on the corner of the paper the way it did when the front desk’s unflappable detective hit something she had not seen come up that cable car before.
“These are,” Poppy said, carefully, “amendments. To the standard agreement.”
“They are,” the woman said. Low, precise, every word costed out.
“I’d like them reviewed before I unpack.
I don’t unpack into uncertainty.” She glanced once around the hall, assessing it, pricing it, and her gaze passed over me up on the gallery for exactly one second, clocked me as staff, as furniture, and moved on.
“Where is the directress? I have questions her brochure didn’t answer, and I have a calendar that doesn’t wait. ”
Poppy looked down at the folder of amendments, and then up at the woman, and then, very briefly, up at me on the gallery, with an expression that said, clear as a bell across the hall:
Here we go.